Born: Toledo, Ohio
U.S. Army
Served in Vietnam
1968-69

From the artist (from newspaper article):

The war was mostly boring, but then ten percent of the time you're scared shitless. It's so unpredictable...the psychic angst...question of who's the enemy--not just in terms of the Vietnamese, but your peers at home are doing one thing, and mostly you're just trying to save your ass...I was almost killed by our own people some seven times...the whole situation was laced with contradiction-- and then the war was fought in such a bureaucratic way. To think that you could just go into a country and win a war when the people didn't want you there.

Having been in Vietnam opens up all these doors as windows in your head that you never really knew existed growing up in a white middle class high school culture. All your potentials have been blown wide open, but then you live in this world. The problem vets get into is not knowing how to deal with that intensity, that opening--they feel the need to recreate that intensity for themselves, or they don't know how to use it positively...feelings are like energy that blows through you. You can try to acknowledge, control or contain them. It's better to just go with them, to try to use them for some better purpose.